Welcome to REID’S READER, a site renewed weekly and devoted to the appreciation and discussion of books old and new by bibliophile, critic and reviewer Nicholas Reid. Each week REID’S READER offers Something New, Something Old and Something Thoughtful to readers and browsers. REID’S READER will sometimes feature guest reviewers and will sometimes offer general book news, but it does not run publishers’ publicity material.
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Monday, September 3, 2012

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“FUHRER-EX: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Nazi” by Ingo Hasselbach
(with Tom Reiss) (first published 1996)

I have just
read and considered one confessional book by a man who searched his conscience,
left a violent extremist organization, and chose to publicly recant – Maajid
Nawaz’s Radical – My Journey From
Islamist Extremism to a Democratic Awakening.

It put me
in mind of another recanting book I reviewed on first publication, although the
extremist organization to which the young German Ingo Hasselbach belonged will
strike most readers as even more repellent than radical Islamism. Hasselbach
was a neo-Nazi skinhead, the German equivalent of the racist yobs who chased
young Maajid Nawaz around Southend.

In a way,
it’s easy enough to see why Ingo Hasselbach became a neo-Nazi in the first
place. He was born in 1967 and raised in the old Communist East Germany, aptly
described as “a jail with 16 million inmates”. His parents were convinced
Communists who neglected the boy and left him largely in the care of his
grandparents. Daubing swastikas on public buildings at night was the ultimate
form of rebellion for those disaffected working-class East German teenagers
with whom Hasselbach mingled. A way of taunting one totalitarian regime with
the symbols of another. East German authorities convicted teenaged Hasselbach a
number of times for “rowdyism”.

It’s even
easy enough to see why Hasselbach remained a neo-Nazi after the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989, when he was 22. Over in the West, among his fellow
unemployed, there were plenty of street-brawling punks ready to boost his ego
by hailing him as their natural Fuhrer. The best part of two metres tell and
fair-haired, Hasselbach looked the perfect Aryan “blond beast”. After years of
deprivation, “Ossis” (Germans from the economically-depressed Eastern part of
what was now a united Germany) were angrier than other German youths and primed
to take out their anger on somebody.

What is
less easy to understand is why Hasselbach stayed on the neo-Nazi skinhead scene
for so long.

Fuhrer-Ex is the English-language
re-write of the original German-language version of Hasselbach’s autobiography,
which was entitled Die Abrechnung: Ein Neonazi steigt aus and was written in 1993 with the help of the
journalist Winfried Bonengel. Fuhrer-Ex
was put together with the help of an American co-writer Tom Reiss. Through the
incongruous American idioms which were presumably devised by Reiss, Hasselbach
emerges as an intelligent and remorseful young man, properly repentant that he
ever spread hate literature, fire-bombed hostels of Turkish Gastarbeiter, and indoctrinated gullible
working-class youngsters into the skinhead movement.

The
mechanism of his conversion to sanity is rather murky, however, and comes
fairly late in the book. Why did he suddenly lose his taste for kicking in
heads with his paratrooper boots?

It’s the
suddenness of his change that is disconcerting in reading this book, although
Hasselbach’s sincerity is not in doubt. At the age of 25 he turned himself in
to police, voluntarily incriminated himself by giving details on his violent
activities, and was handed a two-year suspended sentence. He also gave details
that dobbed in other skinheads, so he became a marked man among his violent
former Waffenbruder. He joined the
EXIT organization designed to encourage others to leave off being skinheads,
and went from one anti-racist speaking engagement to another, sometimes with
police protection.

Much of Fuhrer-Ex is necessarily grim and
unpleasant reading, but with some interesting insights along the way. As in the
original Stormtroopers there was a strong homo-erotic element in neo-Nazi
skinhead outfits even if they professed to hate homosexuals. Clearly, too, the
anarchist gangs they rumbled with were exactly the same sort of kids as they were themselves – unemployed,
hating authority and spoiling for a fight. Often enough, ideologies were mere
veneers.

They were
few in number. When Hasselbach’s old gang summoned right-wing punks and
skinheads on a highly publicised visit to Rudolf Hess’s grave, they could
scrape together barely 2000 supporters from all of Germany and Austria.

Do books
like Fuhrer-Ex serve as timely
exposes? Or do they magnify a small local problem? That’s a really hard call –
especially as Hasselbach’s book sometimes conveys the visceral thrill of being
a complete thug.

There is
something about violence that can’t be exorcised, even by a well-intentioned
recanting.